Tip: Law of Diminishing Returns

  What do a college dorm, micro-economics, your practice efficiency, and Will Ferrell all have in common?

 The "Law of Diminishing Returns"!

  Don't let the name scare you off though. It's actually a pretty simple concept, but is vital for anyone looking to get the most out of their work. Keep reading and you'll get a solid example of this law from a few college students ...and maybe even some Afternoon Delight.

Video Evidence

The Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns

--This video does a great job at explaining the principal of the law. If you have more people doing the work then it'll get more efficiently. The problem is that, at a certain point, once you get more people involved it becomes cluttered and more of a hassle. The Law of Diminishing Returns holds true for many businesses and is heavily used in economics classes. That's all well and good, but how does it start to apply to us as musicians...

Graph of Practicing

  As musicians, we're going to stop thinking about the efficiency side of the graph in terms of "number of workers", and instead take it to mean "development of a new habit".

  An example of this is if a student goes in for his lesson and his teacher finds out he's been tonguing in between his teeth. The teacher wants him to tongue farther back in the mouth, at a specified location, and try to form that new location as a habit.

  The student then goes home and spends the week thinking, "Tongue farther back in the mouth."

  

  A week's worth of work on developing this new habit is displayed below, in correlation to attaining the proper technique.

Explaining the Graph

• Efficiency: We stated before that efficiency can be translated to "development of a new habit", and what that means is how close you to the desired/proper technique (100% mark).
• Amount of Work Done: This is the time, focus, and energy spent working out a certain problem.
• Diminishing Returns: When the student first starts out with thinking about moving the tongue back his gains are tremendous, shown at "A". Once the students get closer to the proper technique it becomes a more fine-tuned process and the the gains are much less for the same amount of time he spends on it, shown at "B". As you go further back you realize that, at "C", he actually starts getting worse. This is because he's now practicing the bad habit of tonguing too far back in the mouth.
• Point of Diminishing Returns: This the ideal point we all want to reach. This is where perfect technique lies and it's a slippery slope in each direction. Either you push far enough and never get to this point, or you push past too far and end up on the other "wrong side".

What Does This All Mean?

  If we can become aware of this tendency, and act accordingly with it, then we can all become much better practicers. Just think if you didn't have to worry about how to correct a problem, and instead were able to solve it at the quickest rate possible. Learning to feel when the point of diminishing returns occurs takes time to realize, but will save you tons of time in the long run with working out bad habits of all kinds.